How arid it must be to be a man

The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith. Page 77. An extended setting and rumination.

“They moved through to the music room, a small room at the back of the house, furnished with a restored Edwardian music stand and her mother’s baby grand piano. Jamie opened his music case and extracted a thin album of music, which he handed to Isabel for examination. She flicked through the pages and smiled. It was exactly the sort of music that he always chose, settings of Burns, arias from Gilbert and Sullivan, and, of course, “O mio babbino caro.”

“Just right for your voice,” Isabel said. “As usual.”

Jamie blushed. “I’m not much good at the newer stuff,” he said. “Remember that Britten? I couldn’t do it.”

Isabel was quick to reassure him. “I like these,” she said. “They’re much easier to play than Britten.”

She paged through the book again and made her choice.

“‘Take a pair of sparkling eyes’?”

“Just so,” said Jamie.

She began the introduction and Jamie, standing in his singing pose, head tilted slightly forward so as not to restrict the larynx, gave voice to the song. Isabel played with determination—which was the only way to play Gilbert and Sullivan, she thought—and they finished with a flourish that was not exactly in the music but that could have been there if Sullivan had bothered. Then it was Burns, and “John Anderson, My Jo.”

John Anderson, she thought. Yes. A reflection on the passage of the years, and of love that survives. But blessings on your frosty pow, John Anderson, my jo. There was an ineffable sadness in this line that always made her catch her breath. This was Burns in his gentler mood, addressing a constancy that by all accounts, including his own, eluded him in his own relations with women. What a hypocrite! Or was he? Was there anything wrong with celebrating qualities one lacked oneself? Surely not. People who suffered from akrasia (which philosophers knew all about and enjoyed debating at great length) could still profess that it was better to do that which they themselves could not do. You can say that it is bad to overindulge in chocolate, or wine, or any of the other things in which people like to overindulge, and still overindulge yourself. The important thing, surely, is not to conceal your own overindulgence.

“John Anderson” was meant to be sung by a woman, but men could sing it if they wished. And in a way it was even more touching when sung by a man, as it could be about a male friendship too. Not that men liked to talk—still less to sing—about such things, which was something which had always puzzled Isabel. Women were so much more natural in their friendships, and in their acceptance of what their friendships meant to them. Men were so different: they kept their friends at arm’s length and never admitted their feelings for them. How arid it must be to be a man; how constrained; what a whole world of emotion, and sympathy, they must lack; like living in the desert. And yet how many exceptions there were; how marvellous, for example, it must be to be Jamie, with that remarkable face of his, so full of feeling, like the face of one of those young men in Florentine Renaissance paintings.

“John Anderson,” said Isabel, as she played the last chord, and the music faded away. “I was thinking of you and John Anderson. Your friend John Anderson.”

“I never had one,” said Jamie. “I never had a friend like that.”

Isabel looked up from the music, and out the window. It was beginning to get dark, and the branches of the trees were silhouetted against a pale evening sky.

“Nobody? Not even as a boy? I thought boys had passionate friendships. David and Jonathan.”

Jamie shrugged. “I had friends. But none I stuck to for years and years. Nobody I could sing that about.”

“How sad,” said Isabel. “And do you not regret it?”

Jamie thought for a moment. “I suppose I do,” he said. “I’d like to have lots of friends.”

“You could get lots of friends,” said Isabel. “You people—at your age—you can make friends so easily.”

“But I don’t,” said Jamie. "I just want . . . "

“Of course,” said Isabel. She lowered the keyboard cover and rose to her feet.

“We shall go through for dinner now,” she said. “That’s what we shall do. But first …”

She turned back to the piano and began to play once more, and Jamie smiled. “Soave sia il vento,” may the breeze be gentle, the breeze that takes your vessel on its course; may the waves be calm. An aria more divine than anything else ever written, thought Isabel, and expressing such a kind sentiment too, what one might wish for anybody, and oneself too, although one knew that sometimes it was not like that, that sometimes it was quite different.